Tuesday, December 01, 2015

Just Cause 3 (Early, Early Notes)

I've only played for about an hour, because I'm fiddling with control settings and a few other things.

Bullet points:
--this is, hands down, the best-looking game I've ever played. Utterly spectacular.
--I'm having zero performance problems, but be warned that plenty of other people are having issues ranging from long load times to extremely poor graphics performance. AMD GPUs seem to be having significant issues.
--the cut scenes are tremendously clever and a significant upgrade over JC2.
--the wingsuit and enhanced grappling hook (which can connect objects to each other) are brilliant.
--the gameplay is very speed focused, so learning control combinations and when to do different moves is extremely important. The more fluid you are, the more fun the game becomes.

This is a spaghetti western--campy, but on purpose, and ridiculously frantic and fun.

My only issue right now is that there is one "feature" that is driving me crazy, and I can't seem to turn it off. In the Steam version, the game is constantly showing me "personal best" information versus my Steam friends in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. Global leaderboards can be turned off, but I haven't been able to turn off the local leaderboards, and I shouldn't have to start Steam in offline mode to be able to do that--it should be an in-game setting.

The game looks so spectacular that seeing leaderboard info splashing up constantly is tremendously distracting and really takes me out of the game world. Don't force me out of immersion, Avalanche Studios!